Quotes About Community

That fall, they moved in a greyhound named Target, a lapdog named Ginger, the four cats, and the birds. They threw out all their artificial plants and put live plants in every room. Staff members brought their kids to hang out after school; friends and family put in a garden at the back of the home and a playground for the kids. It was shock therapy.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

people who don't know one another's names don't work together nearly as well as those who do.

The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.

In fact, he argued, human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.

Once again, the salient risk factors seem to be social rather than physical.

For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—

BILL THOMAS WANTED to remake the nursing home.

they provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror.

Del Webb, an Arizona real estate developer, popularized the term "retirement community" in 1960 when he launched Sun City, a community in Phoenix that was among the first to limit its residents to retirees. It was a controversial idea at the time.

And having a place that genuinely feels like your home can seem as essential to a person as water to a fish.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

Jessie F. Richardson Foundation

that no one was volunteering to take Friday the thirteenth.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be femme, and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be butch. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?